head to head · open source
orm vs rocksdb
orm has 47,664 GitHub stars, 2,634 forks, 2,627 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rocksdb has 32,241 stars, 7,006 forks, 1,645 open issues and last shipped yesterday. orm leads on adoption by 48% (47,664 vs 32,241 stars). orm is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; rocksdb is written in C++ under GPL-2.0. orm has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, rocksdb 22%. rocksdb was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (database), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| orm | rocksdb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 32K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 7.0K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick orm if
- You weight community size — 48K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick rocksdb if
- You want the rocksdb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and rocksdb fits your workflow better
About orm
Docs Discord X Blog Post Architecture Using Prisma 7? It remains fully supported. Its source lives on the v7 branch of this repository and its docs at prisma.io/docs/orm/v7. Prisma 8 is a release candidate. 8.0.0 final is expected in the next four to eight weeks. Until then a release candidate may include breaking changes, and every release ships with an upgrade recipe that the prisma 8 skill applies for you. The candidate is a complete implementation we stand behind: we treat bugs in it as urgent, and the risk you take on is a feature that is not built yet rather than churn. The feature scoreboard names every…
About rocksdb
RocksDB: A Persistent Key Value Store for Flash and RAM Storage RocksDB is developed and maintained by Facebook Database Engineering Team. It is built on earlier work on LevelDB by Sanjay Ghemawat (sanjay@google.com) and Jeff Dean (jeff@google.com) This code is a library that forms the core building block for a fast key value server, especially suited for storing data on flash drives. It has a Log Structured Merge Database (LSM) design with flexible tradeoffs between Write Amplification Factor (WAF), Read Amplification Factor (RAF) and Space Amplification Factor (SAF). It has multi threaded compactions, making…
read the full rocksdb overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Databases projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Databases field.
Frequently asked questions
Is orm or rocksdb more popular?
orm has 47,664 GitHub stars and rocksdb has 32,241. orm has the larger community by that measure.
Are orm and rocksdb free?
Both are open source. orm is licensed under Apache-2.0 and rocksdb under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between orm and rocksdb?
orm is written in TypeScript and rocksdb in C++. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, orm or rocksdb?
Choose orm if you want the larger community (47,664 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose rocksdb if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.